anti-civ 101
Protest Camps As Indigenous Communities
Consider an indigenous community, and the past comes rushing back – at least for those people indoctrinated into a culture that detests any forms of living that do not lie open-mouthed under the teat of market capitalism. The drips of golden promise that sate the appetites of the brainwashed are enough to keep the lie going: “Anything that doesn’t contribute to economic growth is irrelevant.” In this mindset, we reflect on indigenous communities as the “old way”, something that is elsewhere in time and space; something we have moved on from.
We are killing our species in a systematic, centrally controlled manner, destroying countless other organisms that take the shrapnel of our cluster-bomb capitalism, and wiping out any chance of future habitation as our toxic dream takes shape in the citadels of technology, wealth and power. And then…crunch! The dream ends, and it’s too late to realise we never woke up.
Meanwhile, in the last viable places, the indigenous people cling on, because they were spared the lies. And perhaps these people are closer than we think; for as some of us decide to walk away from the machine, however briefly, we feel the pull of connection, and start to understand that to be indigenous you don’t have to be unseen: you just have to be in touch with what you depend upon.
Something as apparently ramshackle and uncontrolled as a protest camp is, in fact, far more like an indigenous community than it would first seem to be – we can learn from the camps many important lessons that could help us make new lives for ourselves. Protest camps, like the one I am using as a model – which I will call “Camp A” – are communities set up out of necessity. Primarily, they exist in order to achieve a short-term ambition; but to achieve even a short-term goal, such as blocking a road, they must exist in a manner that takes account of their surroundings and the services available to them.
It is immediately apparent that this is how indigenous communities operate – not for any “ethical” reasons, but in order to survive. There are probably three main factors that are responsible for Camp A’s “indigenous” behaviour: convenience, cost and practicality. For instance, most staple goods are bought from the local, low-cost supermarket (straight away you see the “ethics” factor taking a back seat), simply because it is close to the site; for more specialised goods there are a range of outlets within walking distance, and some sources, like a local Farmers Market, are cheaper for certain goods, which is the main reason that non-perishables are bought in bulk. Convenience and Cost are playing a major part. The purchased goods are, by necessity, but also to provide an element of essential connection to the land – thus reinforcing the reason for the camp existing in the first place – supplemented by allotment-grown fresh produce. This takes time, but also saves money, reducing the need further for external forms of income – breaking the ties with the capital system.
Practicality plays a major part, especially in terms of non-food items: this is governed by something called “incumbence”. Hunter-gatherer tribes, more than other types of indigenous community, have little use for material goods, and the more nomadic the tribe, the more of an incumbence material goods are. Unless the goods have ongoing practical use then they are not acquired – and this seems to place Camp A far more in the hunter-gatherer category, than that of the established village-based community. In the event of an eviction, anything that cannot be immediately gathered up is likely to be destroyed, stolen or lost, so personal and collective material goods are kept to a minimum. This has the side-effect of reducing the individuals’ dependence on material goods: a positive cycle of independence (as opposed to the negative, civilized cycle of dependence) is created. The camp progressively becomes more indigenous.
On top of this is the need for self-sufficiency in a psychological sense – effectively maintaining distance between the civilized state of mind where the road (in the case of Camp A) is wanted, and the collective desire to prevent the road. This psychological self-sufficiency is vital in maintaining the community: the community must have a number of collective needs in order to stay together. The reason many protest camps fail is because there are too many disperate motives – there is no sense of community. In order to be successful, the protest camp must cultivate this indigenous behaviour: no tribe has ever succeeded in the long-term without a collective sense of belonging, and the needs that accompany that.
Camp A is not just a place, it is a state of mind. It is, to all intents a purposes, a unique culture. We could do a lot worse than look to these protest camps, and the communities that sometimes form as a result of them, and learn from them. By losing our dependence on the civilized world, and becoming “indigenous” we have a far better chance of survival than the drip-fed, dependent masses.
Formulating a Future: The Case for Anti-Modernism, Part I
Sharon Astyk, at Casaubons Book puts the case for ‘anti-modernism’, which seems very much like the case for dismatling civilisation.
One of the best things about life is the strange bedfellows you find in it. It makes for one heck of a slumber party.
I was thinking about this recently, because I happened to follow out the links that people have been putting in to my posts one afternoon when I had time to kill, just out of curiosity. I do this periodically, but I’d never done so systematically, or sat down to really sort through them. And the juxtaposition, say of the black women survivalists with the urban Catholic distributist nuns, the anarchist social critics and the right wing ones, the Belizian Mennonites, the Mormon food storage people, the Pagan Fiber artists, the Baptist farmers, the socialist Baptist farmers, and the guy who occasionally sticks my pieces in with his essays on South African poetry made for a truly engaging collage. And it got me asking – what do all of us have in common?
We certainly don’t share a primary political bond, or religious faith – or at least most of us don’t. After my post recently on the role of religious communities in the future, I got emails from members of 27 distinct religious groups, not to mention plenty of athiests and agnostics. My readers cross the political spectrum.
National bonds, cultural ones, racial and ethnic ones – all of these are too variable to provide primary common ground. Even common belief about climate change, peak oil or the financial situation isn’t sufficient – I have quite a few readers who are climate change dissenters, but who share my perspective on other grounds, and plenty who think peak oil is a hoax, but have agrarian priorities. And while I disagree with them, I’m truly glad they are part of my readership, since being agreed with all the time is bad for my intellect, not to mention dull.
In the end, there is a common ground, however, and it is simply this – most of my readers come to this blog with a pervasive sense that what industrial society seems to promise them either has not arrived, or is not coming. They see no future for themselves in the path we’ve been on.
And they are not wrong. The whole premise of modernity as we practice it now is that future generations won’t mind the fact that we are using resources they will require, polluting and destroying the future capacity of the earth. The whole and most fundamental premise of modernity is this – that because progress always goes forward, there is no need to consider the future. And thus we create a culture that reverses the ordinary human desire to pass down to one’s posterity more than one already had – now we arrange life so that the future serves the present – children as yet unconceived will pay our debts and clean our messes. The future is always and inevitably enslaved to the present, and since we do not wish to acknowledge this, we do not enjoy looking at the moral consequences of this, there is no reason to think much about the future at all. Thus, modernity at one blow disposes of any future that doesn’t look like a science fiction movie.
I think it is important to realize that we cannot separate out the failures of industrial society in the present from the failures in the future. That is, peak oil and climate change (and the food crisis, overpopulation and the financial crisis and any other problems you want to pile on to the list up to and including waxy yellow buildup) are fundamentally, symptoms of a larger societal problem – industrial modernization. I don’t think that the root cause is energy depletion or the side effects (ie climate change and pollution) of energy use – that too is a symptom of a larger mindset that says that all we have to do is pour more and more resources into technologies and “development” and we can create paradise.
I don’t, thus, want to speak, as some people do, of energy as the master resource in this. Energy is extremely valuable – but the roots of our fossil fuel dependence go deep into our colonial past, and our dependence on the energy of human labor in slavery and colonialism.
And ultimately, it is this that my readership has in common – anti-modernism, a fundamental skepticism that economic growth, more energy, more technology, more shiny things, minor economic social change and other incremental variations on the same basic themes can resolve the deeper problems. Fundamentally, most people have either made a leap to the belief that some new model is required, or they are on the cusp of such a leap, struggling to balance the fact that our society views the price of modernity, even the costs to (and of) the future as a reasonable one, a mere side effect of a progress that is simultaneously inevitable and necessary to keep us all from an endless misery and suffering.
It would be easy to reject the idea of anti-modernity – after all, one could make the case that many positive and noble ideas and advances from longer lifespans and the germ theory of disease to voting rights for women are a product of modernity – reject modernity, the reasoning goes, and we’re back to wallowing in our own filth. Nor is it particularly politically realistic to imagine a wholly agrarian society, in a world of nearly 7 billion people. And this is a reasonable point, to a point. This is one of the reasons I don’t call this agrarianism.And this would be a fair critique were anti-modernity purely retrospective, the nostalgic longing for a golden past – in that case it would be easy and right to correct it with the reminder that the past was not golden. That’s the cartoon version of anti-modernism, in which it is simply a longing to go backwards. But backwards is a direction not available to us, even if we wanted it. Anti-modernism begins from modernism, from an industrialized society with the germ theory of disease and depleted farm land, civil rights laws and toilet paper. The idea is to go forward towards a future, not to find another futureless image, in which nostalgia is all. There are legitimate debates about what of the good of modernism can be carried with us into the future without compromising our future, but as I point out in _Depletion and Abundance_ there are much less modernized cultures that have lifespans as long as ours, literacy rates that are similar and political power for women.
The progressive industrial worldview, combined with the habit of a false dualism (ie, that there is nothing between apocalyptic misery and the technological perfection of the future, what I often call the “Klingons vs. Cylons” fallacy), and between “techno future” and “regression” is very hard to shake off. Thus it is quite remarkable that as many people have done so as have. In fact, there are encouraging signs, I think, that the society as a whole is beginning to do so – consider the recent poll data that suggested that just about half of all Americans think socialism either might be better than capitalism or don’t know if it might be. While I suspect most Americans don’t really know what socialism (or capitalism) are, this is all the more astounding because Americans are taught to believe in capitalism, not as a fully comprehended thought, but as the “home team” that you root for win or lose. The idea that most Americans are ready to abandon their home team is pretty astonishing. The poll represents not a reconsideration of socialism, I suspect, but a longing for another choice outside the one that has failed them. As usual, the only choice presented are a false dualism – other economic possibilities aren’t even mentioned. But this is no accident – industrial modernity, capitalist or socialist (and both are fundamentally industrial and modernist) is a totalizing worldview, which doesn’t merely affirm one choice, but strives to eliminate alternatives.
And this, perhaps, is what makes me affirm my identity as an anti-modernist, and to think that this might be the right way to think about the common ground that I have with people who I would not ordinarily know or meet, and in many cases, with whom I would ordinarily be discouraged from working. That is, it is all very well for me to wax rhapsodic about the “diversity” of my readership, but our society, which uses enlightenment political categories as weapons, is very clear in its message that I shouldn’t actually try and work with people (and get them to work with each other) who commit the deep sin of standing on the other side of those political and national barriers from one another.
And there are real reasons to wonder whether people who, say, believe that population is the root problem of modernity and should be constrained at all costs and people who believe that reproduction is a blessing and a gift to be welcomed can work with one another on creating a sustainable future. There are real reasons to wonder why those who believe that abortion should be illegal and those who believe it should be a private matter for women and their doctors can ally even tenuously on other matters, and how strong those alliances might be. There are reasons to wonder whether climate change activists and dissenters can work well together on agrarian issues, or how the Global South and North views of ecology might come together. It is not my claim that anti-modernist ties are sufficient to obviate all other political categories. But I would claim that they are sufficient to build something upon.
Of course, this has been done before – the agrarian movement is an entertaining mix of aging Hippies and conservative Christians already, the anti-globalization movement has Pat Buchanan and George Monbiot, and any world climate conference will present fascinating alliances between nations that before had little in common. I’m hardly suggesting anything new.
But ultimately, what I would suggest is that, without overly eliding essential differences, it is possible to imagine that anti-modernism, that is, a commitment to and belief in the future both in the abstract and the real bodies of our real posterity, is sufficient to carry the weight of a movement. If that is not sufficient to bear political fruit, what else is, after all?
I would expect the many and varied debates that are already going on between disparate views of what society should look like to be both engaging and contentious. I think that if such an anti-modernist identity could collectively arise, and a political rubric be created for at least some alliance, we would have to decide what future vision we all collectively stand in favor of, rather than simply opposing the totalizing vision of modernity. I suspect hybrids and factions will arise in fascinating and troubling ways. I don’t know that I will always like what such alliances achieve.
And yet, I think it is necessary. Agrarianism alone, peak oil awareness alone, eco-village culture alone, traditionalism alone, anarcho-agrarianism alone, crunchy conservativism alone, anti-globalization alone, climate activism alone, survivalism alone, distributism alone, radical homemaking alone, or any of the complex personal identities we create for ourselves alone are insufficient to stand against to the totalizing message of modernity, the one that erases even the possibility of our existence. All of these identities alone ultimately leave us…alone, too few to make an impact, without sufficient density of culture to draw others together under our rubric. If we are not to be small outposts alone, dissenting from modernity as it devours our future, our only hope is a unified case to preserve it.
The Unreachable Dream: The Terrible Loss Of Humanity
I’m watching the seagulls as they pour their vengeance down upon a crow, fluttering and stalling in the afternoon sky but resisting again and again until the onslaught becomes too much and it is forced to retreat to the crown of a tree far away. The seagulls catch the thermals and rise away to wherever it was they were defending. All this is viewed through a double-glazed window looking out onto a concrete and blacktop street lined, end-to-end, with brick, glass and concrete houses.
All this is out “there”, maybe fifty metres from where I stand, but a whole world away from the one I still live in: civilization came and took me from birth, entrapped me in a place I would call home and assume was the only place that mattered. I grew up; I dreamed of exam results, a degree, a job, a house, promotion, computers, fitted kitchen, conservatory, holidays, retirement…I don’t remember dreaming of death much. It was there, though, after the pension, or maybe before: before I had the time to enjoy the fruits of 40 years of toil, working for the machine that I called “employment”, buying the goods of the machine that I called “retail”, looking through the windows of the machine that I called “home”.
I want to be up there with the birds. Fuck the machine; fuck the system; fuck this steel, concrete and glass veneer that shuts us in and keeps us close so we can bleed ourselves dry in pursuit of a dream we have been forcefed from birth – a dream that sucks the humanity out of us and leaves civilians: loyal, hard-working, dreaming civilians that watch the skies for a second then turn away, unmoved.
Permaculture as a tool for Dismantling Civilisation
Permaculture has been mentioned regularly on this site and others as a sustainable way to live on the earth, a way in which to limit our environmental impact whilst using the earth’s resources. It is noticeable, however, how large a breadth of alternative visions are held by those practicing or praising Permaculture. This and similar sites promotes it in the context of Dismantling Civilisation, whilst most use it as a way of making Civilisation more sustainable. We believe that Permaculture is at its most useful and beneficial applied to Rewilding, rather than limiting it to reforming Civilisation.
A short definition of Permaculture is that it is a system of designing with the intent of replicating the cyclical systems of nature. This began with just food production (Permaculture derives from Permanent Agriculture), but it was soon realised it could be applied to all areas of life to make them sustainable. A Permaculture garden can often be described as an ‘edible ecosystem’, with plants beneficial to humans placed in relation to each other and other influences and factors so that every output is another’s input – there is no waste. It is based on the realisation that nature does, and has done for 4.6 billion years, a much better job than us of creating complex systems with high biomass and diversity that satisfies all the lifeforms involved. Monocultural agriculture has failed to create anything near as complex, and requires huge inputs compared to a self-sustaining forest. As a result of these concepts, Permaculture is very much an inclusive approach, seeing humans as part of the global ecosystem, and not separate as in the myths of Civilisation.
A growing movement of people have taken up Permaculture as a great way forward, seeing it as the best path to sustainability. This can be seen in the Transition movement, in which people are preparing for Peak Oil and Climate Chaos by collectively reducing their town or village or cities energy requirements. However, most of these people see it as a way of making the current state of affairs more sustainable – they are reforming Civilisation with it rather than dismantling it. When talking about ‘doomers’ i.e. those who believe we are on the brink of collapse, I have heard remarks questioning their sanity and motives, seeing them as extreme and unhelpful in the debate. Even in these circles, questioning Civilisation can be a risky business.
These movements are at the forefront of the environmental movement, and show some of the best reactions yet to the global crisis. But how much difference can they make if limited to reforming civilisation? Permaculture is based around principles including cyclical systems with no waste, equality of parts, inclusivity of humans and fairshares. Civilisation, in contrast, is based upon the principles of linear, non-cyclical systems (input-process-output) creating waste and resource depletion, inequality of parts through hierarchy, humans as being separate to the earth and thus able to abuse it, and unequal shares of natural resources. The two are complete opposites! If we were to fully implement Permaculture to its full extent, Civilisation would have to be dismantled and replaced. Just partially implementing it to counter the negative consequences of Civilisation is not enough to stop the rape of the earth.
It is not the reformist’s fault that they stop short of attacking civilisation – it is all they have ever known and are unlikely to have considered its structure and impact on the planet. Their action through community gardening, smallholdings and Transition Initiatives is an inspiring first step in tackling the world’s problems. But we have to take the next steps beyond this quickly in the short time we have, and to do that Permaculture has to be seen as a tool for many further means. Permaculture is an immensely useful tool for repairing our relationship with the earth and its inhabitants, but in order for its full potential to be realised we must use it for rewilding, not just reforming.
civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths
BEWARE OF THE PSYCHOPATH MY SON, By Clinton Callahan
I make the effort to share this information because it gives me, at last, a plausible answer to a long-unanswered question: Why, no matter how much intelligent goodwill exists in the world, is there so much war, suffering and injustice? It doesn’t seem to matter what creative plan, ideology, religion, or philosophy great minds come up with, nothing seems to improve our lot. Since the dawn of civilization, this pattern repeats itself over and over again.
The answer is that civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been built on slavery and mass murder. Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, cheat, steal, torture, manipulate, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse, in order to establish their own sense of security through domination. The inventor of civilization – the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers – was almost certainly a genetic psychopath. Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non-psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies – especially military hierarchies.
And this system actually rewards those who act like psychopaths – you dont get to the top by being nice.
During the past fifty years, psychopaths have gained almost absolute control of all the branches of government. You can notice this if you observe carefully that no matter what illegal thing a modern politician does, no one will really take him to task. All of the so called scandals that have come up, any one of which would have taken down an authentic administration, are just farces played out for the public, to distract them, to make them think that the democracy is still working.
One of the main factors to consider in terms of how a society can be taken over by a group of pathological deviants is that the psychopaths’ only limitation is the participation of susceptible individuals within that given society. Lobaczewski gives an average figure for the most active deviants of approximately 6% of a given population. (1% essential psychopaths and up to 5% other psychopathies and characteropathies.) The essential psychopath is at the center of the web. The others form the first tier of the psychopath’s control system.
The next tier of such a system is composed of individuals who were born normal, but are either already warped by long-term exposure to psychopathic material via familial or social influences, or who, through psychic weakness have chosen to meet the demands of psychopathy for their own selfish ends. Numerically, according to Lobaczewski, this group is about 12% of a given population under normal conditions.
So approximately 18% of any given population is active in the creation and imposition of a Pathocracy. The 6% group constitutes the Pathocratic nobility and the 12% group forms the new bourgeoisie, whose economic situation is the most advantageous.
18%, just short of one in five of the population. Somehow we need to take society back from these people, and create a society where people are rewarded for helping each other, replanting forest, encouraging diversity, sharing etc.
Today, thanks to new information technologies, we are on the brink of unmasking the psychopaths and building a civilization of, by and for the healthy human being – a civilization without war, a civilization based on truth, a civilization in which the saintly few rather than the diabolical few would gravitate to positions of power. We already have the knowledge necessary to diagnose psychopathic personalities and keep them out of power. We have the knowledge necessary to dismantle the institutions in which psychopaths especially flourish – militaries, intelligence agencies, large corporations, and secret societies. We simply need to disseminate this knowledge, and the will to use it, as widely and as quickly as possible.
Until the knowledge and awareness of pathological human beings is given the attention it deserves and becomes part of the general knowledge of all human beings, there is no way that things can be changed in any way that is effective and long-lasting. If half the people agitating for truth or stopping the war or saving the earth would focus their efforts, time and money on exposing psychopathy, we might get somewhere.
It is reasonable to assume that all big organsations are owned and controlled by the psychopaths. Everytime you turn up for work or buy something from/for one of these large corporations, you are supporting its activities and aiding and abetting the agenda of what amounts to very powerful and very well armed bullies. How many school ground bullies do you know who are now very powerful people? This is how civilisation works.
Only when the 75% of humanity with a healthy conscience come to understand that we have a natural predator, a group of people who live amongst us, viewing us as powerless victims to be freely fed upon for achieving their inhuman ends, only then will we take the fierce and immediate actions needed to defend what is preciously human. Psychological deviants have to be removed from any position of power over people of conscience, period. People must be made aware that such individuals exist and must learn how to spot them and their manipulations. The hard part is that one must also struggle against those tendencies to mercy and kindness in oneself in order not to become prey.
The real problem is that the knowledge of psychopathy and how psychopaths rule the world has been effectively hidden. People do not have the adequate, nuanced knowledge they need to really make a change from the bottom up. Again and again, throughout history it has been meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If there is any work that is deserving of full time efforts and devotion for the sake of helping humanity in this present dark time, it is the study of psychopathy and the propagation of this information as far and wide and fast as possible.
A starting point for many of us could be the book Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes.
True change happens in the moment that a person becomes aware of psychopathy in all its chilling details. From this new awareness, the world looks different, and entirely new actions can be taken. Distinguishing between human and psychopathic qualities begins the foundation of responsibility upon which we have a real chance to create sustainable culture.
Derrick Jensen’s Endgame 1 & 2 is also a great place to start. Jensen convincingly argues that civilisation as a whole is psychopathic, and must go, before it makes the planet inhabitable. Callahan’s perspective that 18% of our society are psychopaths, and that they designed civilisation, own and control pretty much everything in civilisation explains why civilisation is so nasty. Its time to dismantle civilisation and build the world that the other 72% of us would like to live in.
endgame – the problem of civilization
So, hopefully you have read Ishmael, and the gorilla has made you start to think about all the things in your life that you believed were ‘normal’ or unchangeable. Mother culture continually reaffirming the values and belief systems of that culture, over and over, day after day after day. Hopefully you have started to doubt and wonder whether it needs to be this way. Hopefully you are ready to look at civilisation, this death culture, with open eyes.
Derek Jensen’s Endgame Volume 1starts with 20 premises:
Premises of Endgame
Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.
Premise Two: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.
Premise Three: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.
Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
Premise Five: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.
Premise Six: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.
Premise Seven: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.
Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.
Another way to put premise Eight: Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and stupid. Sustainability, morality, and intelligence (as well as justice) requires the dismantling of any such economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.
Premise Nine: Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population could occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some of these ways would be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence required, and caused by, the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich, and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps longterm shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.
Premise Ten: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.
Premise Eleven: From the beginning, this culture—civilization—has been a culture of occupation.
Premise Twelve: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.
Premise Thirteen: Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we break ourselves of illusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least begin to make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how we are going to resist.
Premise Fourteen: From birth on—and probably from conception, but I’m not sure how I’d make the case—we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.
Premise Fifteen: Love does not imply pacifism.
Premise Sixteen: The material world is primary. This does not mean that the spirit does not exist, nor that the material world is all there is. It means that spirit mixes with flesh. It means also that real world actions have real world consequences. It means we cannot rely on Jesus, Santa Claus, the Great Mother, or even the Easter Bunny to get us out of this mess. It means this mess really is a mess, and not just the movement of God’s eyebrows. It means we have to face this mess ourselves. It means that for the time we are here on Earth—whether or not we end up somewhere else after we die, and whether we are condemned or privileged to live here—the Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything. It is silly to think or act or be as though this world is not real and primary. It is silly and pathetic to not live our lives as though our lives are real.
Premise Seventeen: It is a mistake (or more likely, denial) to base our decisions on whether actions arising from these will or won’t frighten fence-sitters, or the mass of Americans.
Premise Eighteen: Our current sense of self is no more sustainable than our current use of energy or technology.
Premise Nineteen: The culture’s problem lies above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.
Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.
Modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the monetary fortunes of the decision-makers and those they serve.
Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the power of the decision-makers and those they serve.
Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are founded primarily (and often exclusively) on the almost entirely unexamined belief that the decision-makers and those they serve are entitled to magnify their power and/or financial fortunes at the expense of those below.
Re-modification of Premise Twenty: If you dig to the heart of it—if there were any heart left—you would find that social decisions are determined primarily on the basis of how well these decisions serve the ends of controlling or destroying wild nature.
The rest of the almost 500 page book defends and proves these premises. Its a call to action, for those who care about the future of the earth to do whatever they can and whatever it takes to bring the industrial system, and ultimately civilization down.
We are living through the endgame of civilisation, an endgame that was inevitable the minute human beings started living in cities, and heirarchical systems, with no connection or regard for the landbases they/we need to survive. The level of destruction is increasing as industrial society invents new, faster, bigger, more powerful ways to turn the natural world into ‘products’, energy, money.
Premise 7 states that the longer we wait for civilisation to fail, the worse things will be for the survivors, human and non-human, and for those that come after. This is undoubtedly true. This culture is a run away train heading towards a deadend. When it hits it will be a mess. Anyone who cares, who can see the dead end ahead, and is conscious of the damage it is doing as it ploughs on, should be doing all they can to slow and stop the train.
Endgame 1 is a wake up call. A call to action:
Having long laid waste our own sanity, and having long forgotten what it feels like to be free, most of us too have no idea what it’s like to live in the real world. Seeing four salmon spawn causes me to burst into tears. I have never seen a river full of fish. I have never seen a sky darkened for days by a single flock of birds. (I have, however, seen skies perpetually darkened by smog.) As with freedom, so too the extraordinary beauty and fecundity of the world itself:
It’s hard to love something you’ve never known. It’s hard to convince yourself to fight for
something you may not believe has ever existed.
–from Endgame, Volume I
Brilliantly written, well referenced and inspiring. Its not enough, though, to simply be awake and start preparing for your survival. This machine needs stopping. This civilisation needs dismantling, and it needs doing now. We need to do whatever it takes to stop this culture of occupation dismantling the natural world.
Excerpts:
If you’ve gotten this far in this book—or if you’re simply anything other than entirely insensate—we probably agree that civilization is going to crash, whether or not we help bring this about. If you don’t agree with this, we probably have nothing to say to each other (How ’bout them Cubbies!). We probably also agree that this crash will be messy. We agree further that since industrial civilization is systematically dismantling the ecological infrastructure of the planet, the sooner civilization comes down (whether or not we help it crash) the more life will remain afterwards to support both humans and nonhumans.
You can order the book direct from the author here.
the corporation
This film looks at our economic system, where huge corporations make decisions that affect all of us & planetary eco-system, with little or no accountability.
Corporations are legally bound to maximise profits,while ignoring consequences, for the financial benefit of a few individuals.
They are the epitomy of this civilisation – a culture with little or no connection to its landbase. Millions of humans live in cities. Their everyday needs delivered to them by the corporations. Children grow up never having seen a chicken, or a forest – to view themselves as consumers, their sense of self derived from what they own, working as slaves to the corporations that are chewing up the planet. Civilisation was pretty successful at turning lush forest into desert long before there were corporations, and would continue to do so if corporations were shut down. Modern corporations are just more efficient at turning all they touch to wasteland and toxic hell.
Yes, they need to be stopped, but that is just the start. We need a different kind of society, more small scale, closer to and caring for our landbases, more in touch with where our food comes from, and with real accountability for pollution, violence, ecocide etc.
“No one has the right to toxify a river. No one has the right to pollute the air. No one has the right to drive a creature to extinction, nor destroy a species’ habitat. No one has the right to profit from the labour or misery of another. No one has the right to steal resources from another.”
Derrick Jensen.
http://www.thecorporation.com/
where to start? Ishmael
All your life mother culture has been whispering in your ear the lies and fairy tales that make it all seem normal. Occassionally you may catch a glimpse of reality, but you have been well conditioned, you shake your head and carry on shopping, working or watching TV. Humans are the pinnacle of evolution, and this society is the ultimate acheivement of humanity - right?
But perhaps, like many of us the doubts just wont go away.
There is something inherently wrong with the way we live. So many single issue problems to campaign against. You start to question your role as consumer or worker – why should you work to pay to have a roof over your head? Why should some people have more power than others? The mantra of economic growth starts to ring hollow in your ears, and you just cant get excited anymore about the things you used to – new purchases, christmas, tv shows. It all seems so shallow and meaningless. If only you could put all those nagging doubts together and get a clear overview of society, perhaps you could come up with an alternative way?
But where to start?
Daniel Quinns book, Ishmael, is a pretty good place to start. A dialogue between a gorilla and his human student, the book poses some powerful questions about civilisation, humanity’s role on the planet, religion and how we got here. Labelling our culture as ‘takers’, and other less destructive cultures as ‘leavers’, Ishmael explains it like it is in a clear simple way that will leave you changed. Not a ‘how to’ book, but it will prod you into questioning everything you’ve ever been told.
